define crime

The concept of crime
Criminal codes and other legal formulations
Crime is whatever conduct the laws of a particular jurisdiction designate as criminal, and there are manydifferences from one country to another as to what behaviour is prohibited. Conduct that is lawful in one country may be criminal in another, and activity that amounts to a trivial infraction in one country may constitute a serious crime elsewhere. Changing times and social attitudes may lead to changes in the criminal law, so that behaviour that was once criminal becomes lawful. Abortion, once prohibited except in the most unusual circumstances, has become lawful in many countries, as has homosexual behaviour in private between consenting adults, which was once a serious offense. Suicide and attempted suicide, once criminal, have also been removed from the scope of the criminal law in many countries. Nonetheless, the trend generally is to increase the scope of the criminal law rather than to reduce it. It is more common to find that statutes create new criminal offenses than that they abolish old ones. New technologies give rise to new opportunities for their abuse, which in turn give rise to legal restrictions; just as the invention of the motor vehicle led to the development of a whole body of criminal laws designed to regulate its use, so the widening use of computers has created the need to legislate against a variety of new abuses and frauds—or old frauds committed in new ways.
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